create your own inspiration

While searching the Internet for a scanned image of a page from Paul Arden's wonderful book, Whatever You Think, Think the Opposite, I stumbled on the image below.  I tend to stay away from lists of things to do, especially when they are titled "7 Steps to Achieving a Healthy Work/Life Balance" and the like.  But when I came across the one below, I found it hard to resist.

One of the points that struck a chord was "make your own inspiration".  I prefer to say "create your own inspiration".  Really.  Create your own inspiration.  Just do it.

As thinking beings, we all have thoughts that provoke joy, wonder, and other things within us that we consider good.  These delightful thoughts keep coming back, as if they are bound to us.  We don't even need to bounce them off other people; just being aware of them is sufficient, even fulfilling for a moment.  So why are we not creating from these thoughts?

I have been navigating through the world of self-help for several years now.  It’s a world full of insight and knowledge, some of which has fueled my imagination.  At some point, I realized that I was way too involved that the gap between the imagination that self-help fed me and the reality in which I was living was widening.  And what this realization brought me was distress.  I found myself at a crossroads with a choice to make.  Should I keep imagining a better life or start creating from the imagination that I already had?  I decided to do the latter.  The more I created, the more I discovered that my efforts were providing the inspiration to keep creating.  The gap started to close, the distress started to diminish.  And the delightful thoughts?  They started to multiply.

This process of creation has brought about marvelous experiences in my life, some of which have inspired this blog.  If only I could imagine what marvelous experiences this blog will bring about ...